White Dot Special

Another late night, which I'm guessing is going to be the norm. I happen to very much like my wife and my life outside of my basement workshop, so I try to stay above ground as much as possible, especially in daylight. I'm a human, not an animal! So 3.5 hours mixing epoxy and sanding and sawing can go by really quick when starting at 10:30pm. I do get to roll out of bed at 8:00 and work from home tomorrow (today?), so I can afford a 5 hour sleep night. But I can't keep this up.

I spent most of yesterday's session cleaning up the madness that is casually named "epoxy squeeze out". That's really not appropriate. White stuff from hell is more apt because that is exactly what it is. A few sanding pads later, and I've gotten the centerboard trunk and its friend the centerboard all gussied up, as my clamps will attest. This is actually a major milestone and I'm happy I got this far without totally ruining things.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite PocketShip blogs, where the advice was to take pride in progress, no matter how small. If you were able to find the pencil that night, call it progress. Otherwise, you'll forever be disappointed. So with a few more manual pages done and done, and with enough lead to do at least the centerboard pour and finishing over the weekend, I'm seeing progress. I still can't find my pencil, though.

I need more clamps. Seriously.

Right after this, the manual says to douse a rag in acetone, put it on the end of a stick, and wipe the inside clean. Makes sense on paper. In practice, it was more like suiting up, getting swallowed by an elephant, and passing through to the other side. Acetone, if you're not familiar, smells terribly. It is basically nail polish remover. Add that I was doing this in an enclosed space a few feet from my furnace and I really, really wanted to finish. Even with a mask, I could smell it. The manual also notes that acetone can spontaneously combust. Lovely stuff!

So after a few wipes inside, I shined a light in between the inside faces of the trunk and found this guy. He's cute, but he's trouble (trouble, trouble)

Crisis averted.

This is a dried piece of thickened epoxy that was trying to gremlin his way between a smooth centerboard movement and a forever jam session. Basically, the centerboard has to smoothly move in between these panels for the rest of the boat's life. I got him a few seconds later and pulled him apart into a dozen little pieces. That'll learn him. I then aggressively wiped the rest of the board down and hit this area with a reverse Shop Vac. In a couple days, I'll never get to this area again, so I'm spending a lot of time trying to get this right.

With the centerboard clamped up, I turned to the final piece of blocking for the keel. It's a bit of an odd duck in that the bottom part is to be cut at 15 deg and the top at 25 deg. This relatively simple act of geometry took four tries and a few board feet of Menard's finest select pine.

This is what scrap wood looks like.

Another little complexity is that the end piece, according to the manual, is 'slightly larger than 3/4" to fit the profile of the aft keel blocking'. In other words, I had to thicken it up. The keel blocking came out to 105/128" on my digital caliper while my 3/4" lumber was actually 97/128", or 1/8" thinner. That was fortunate. I cut this shim from the first attempt at the nose block. Not a big deal, except of course I cut the angles wrong on this thing, too.. twice.. I chalked it up to getting antsy because I thought I'd be done and in bed in 90 minutes. That was a nice thought!